Angela Lansbury’s Husbands: Inside Her 2 Marriages
London-born actor Angela Lansbury died on Oct. 11, 2022, at the age of 96. Many fans may remember her as Jessica Fletcher in the CBS series, Murder, She Wrote, and she graced our screens for over 70 years. Now, we’re looking back on her two marriages and what happened to Angela Lansbury’s husbands. Here’s what we know.
Angela Lansbury’s first husband, Richard Cromwell, left her after a year of marriage
Angela Lansbury had a rich life with decades of fantastic Hollywood roles. And she also had two husbands. According to Closer Weekly, Angela Lansbury’s first husband, Richard Cromwell, was also an actor, and the two tied the knot in 1945.
Lansbury married Cromwell when she was just 19 years, and he was 15 years older than she was. Unfortunately, their marriage didn’t last long.
“I understand younger women marrying older men,” Lansbury told RadioTimes.com of her first marriage. “It’s a father — she didn’t have the father, and now she’s looking for it.”
Cromwell and Lansbury divorced a year later, and Lansbury confirmed Cromwell was gay. “I had no idea that I was marrying a gay man,” she noted. “I found him such an attractive individual, a very glamorous person – he knew everybody, he was a friend of Joan Crawford’s, these people who I was fascinated by as a young actress. And he wanted to marry, he was fascinated with me, but only because of what he had seen on the screen, really.”
Despite their divorce, Lansbury stayed friends with Cromwell until his death from liver cancer in 1960.
Angela Lansbury’s second husband, Peter Shaw, died in 2003
After Richard Cromwell, Angela Lansbury tied the knot with her second husband, Peter Shaw. RadioTimes.com notes Shaw moved to the U.S. after serving in the British army and met Lansbury in 1946. They tied the knot in 1949 and were married for over five decades until he died of heart failure in 2003. According to Lansbury, her relationship with Shaw was “perfect.”
“We had the perfect relationship,” she told the Daily Mail. “Not many people can say that. He was everything to me: We were partners at work as well as husband and wife and lovers. I don’t know how we had such a long marriage, but the simple fact was that we were devoted to one another.”
“We made all decisions jointly and we helped and supported each other constantly,” she continued.
How many children did she have?
Angela Lansbury and her first husband had no children, but she had two kids with Peter Shaw. Anthony was born in 1952, and Deidre was born in 1953. Shaw had a child from another relationship, David, whom Angela grew close to. “My career was important to me but our children, Anthony and Deidre, always came first,” Lansbury told the Daily Mail.
Unfortunately, Lansbury’s kids got into drugs when they were young. She and Shaw ended up moving to County Cork, Ireland, hoping that would help them — and it did. “Anthony pulled right out of his bad habits quite quickly,” she noted. Anthony went on to direct 68 episodes of Murder, She Wrote before retiring.
“It took Deidre (now aged 60) a little longer but she finally got married and she and her husband now live in Los Angeles, where they run their own Italian restaurant,” Lansbury continued.
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